Bazelevs was set up 17 years ago by director and producer Timur Bekmambetov. The company is involved in producing films and adverts, and it also includes a powerful division that specialises in producing computer graphics, animation and special effects for films. Bazelevs’ assets include some of the most-watched Russian films of the last decade: Day Watch and Night Watch and the Hollywood blockbuster Wanted. The sequel to Irony of Fate, shot by Bekmambetov, set a Russian film record with takings of $50 million.
The language being developed by Bazelevs could revolutionise film production, especially in Hollywood. Films now involve such large amounts of money that directors simply have no opportunity for experiments on the set. Filming of a blockbuster only starts when it’s already been made, but only in the form of a cartoon in which all the scenes of the film have been worked up in detail. Making such an anime is a lengthy and expensive business. The Skolkovo project will make it possible to automatically visualise scenes from the film.
Sergei Kuzmin, Vice President of Bazelevs, spoke about the details of this project, and about what animation can do with words and who might be interested in this, in an interview with Business FM.
“In effect this is a technology which makes it possible to create a three-dimensional animation on an automatic basis if you have a certain amount of screenplay material and a structured text.”
“You mean you load the text in, and the system makes an animated film itself?”
“Of course, the ideal option would be this: load in War and Peace, select the button that says ‘I want it like Bondarchuk’s’, and you get a three- to four-hour film. But that level of automation would require artificial intelligence, and what’s more, not just any old kind, but that of a genius director.
“To put it more simply, there’s a library of images, and images are selected from the automatic system from this library for the set of words in the scene, and they are put together into a story?”
“Absolutely correct.”
“Why do we need this system? Today there is an animator or artist who simply draws the whole scene.”
“There is a norm, and it’s not even the Russian norm but the American one: three highly skilled animators make one second of animation per day. That’s the output of professional animators. Even if you do this in a simplified way you get five seconds per day. Imagine that at the moment when the director wants to experiment with a scene, to see how it will really look, he or she has to wait a week to get the next animated episode. Here we are offering an interactive product which enables several people to sit down and effectively play with things like where to position the camera, what’s happening with the characters, and what is the dynamic of the movements. That is, we are providing a way of quickly deciding the whole creative content, after which people can go onto the film set and shoot what has already been tried out – and moreover already knowing how it will be cut, where the cameras will stand, how the lighting will be arranged, how the heroes will act. All this brings in a substantial element of automation. One day of filming in Hollywood on a studio film costs from $150,000 to $500,000. If we can save two days, that’s a very good return on the investment in using this software.”
“If three professional animators work for a whole day on one second, how much time does it take you to do one second?”
“You’ll take about an hour or two per scene, and our average scene is several minutes. The difference is measured in orders of magnitude.”
“That means the work on visualising the script is reduced by tens of times?”
“And the main thing is that it is not only reduced, but now there is a very limited number of directors who can allow themselves to visualise scenes from a film. It’s simply a very expensive process. So we’re making a mass product, where any student at the Russian State University of Cinematography who’s doing a course project on short film can submit it not in the form of a 35-page paper but in the form of a small animated product.”
“Are there any other similar products in existence in the world?”
“A patent search indicates there are no similar products, and from the point of view of practical implementation no such products exist at the moment.”
“Will it be a program?”
“There will be two versions, even two radically different areas. The first product is the so called B2C, which make it possible to work directly with the client. This is either a web service or software. It will most likely be some kind of remote service which you will subscribe to and use. The second part is licensing the core program to people who want to use it for their own purposes. For example, you’re a major studio and you have animated film characters. You get the core program from us, which translates the text into animation, but at the same time you yourself create all the models and these characters’ world, on the basis of the author’s rights which you have. There is a multitude of application methods for commercialising and monetising this. For example, text messaging. You send an SMS or an MMS or you communicate via Skype. If we can put the text into animation, essentially instead of a message you can send your friend some kind of animated film. Or when you receive a message, you can set them up so that you receive an animation. Or you’re updating your status in a social network, but instead of this you get some kind of visual sequence instead of simply text.”
“What stage is the development at now?”
“We launched the project in January 2011, and somewhere before the middle of the summer we were addressing all the fundamental issues: what algorithms to use, in what format to create the library of models. Since the middle of the summer we’ve begun direct development of the programming. Now we have the first prototype, although 3–4 months have passed. And we hope that by the end of the year we’ll have something that we’ll be able to show to potential partners and clients in a closed system.”
“And when do you plan to bring it to the open market?”
“By the end of 2012. That will be what we can show to the market. And since we’re making a distinction here between the actual core, which we’re prepared to license to partners, and the product, which is directly linked with the customer, I think the first consumer products will come out at the beginning of 2013. One of the first products will be animation of text messages, because that’s the fastest product for the market and the most intelligible one to the consumer.”
“And when you are planning the film product?”
“I think that will be the end of 2013. Two years of hard and determined development.”
“What will this project cost you?”
“We estimate the aggregate cost of the project as about $20 million. The grant that we’ve received from Skolkovo is approximately 5 million, and we’re prepared to invest another 5 million of our own funds. That should be enough to see the first return on the product. In the longer term we’re planning either to generate additional venture investment or to reinvest the money that the product generates.”
“What kind of returns are you potentially reckoning on?”
“As in any venture project there are two possible outcomes: either you fail to generate enough returns and go bankrupt or you get exponential growth, when you don’t mind whether the project generates a billion dollars in one year or two.”
“The first product that you want to launch is various mobile apps? Is there some kind of price yet?”
“There is, but I can’t say what it is, because at the moment we’re in negotiations with potential partners.”
“And these potential partners, are they Russian or global companies?”
“The list of companies we’re talking to includes mobile network operators, social networks and Internet communication software manufacturers – ICQ, Skype.”
“Are you also unable to name the sum for which you’ll be willing to sell it to film companies?”
“First it’s important to have a clear understanding of what economic benefit this product gives to film production. And that can only be done and calculated after we’ve used this product on one, two or three of our own projects. Later everything will be decided in negotiations. But the ideal option is when using this product goes into the budget as a savings item rather than as an expenditure item. Then it means a good, fast and easy sale which is fully justified for the studio heads, and it will be easy for them to take such a decision. Hollywood blockbuster budgets already run to hundreds of millions of dollars. The absolute record for production costs is currently held by the film Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. It cost $300 million to make. In the modern film business system the studios’ filming costs are only justified if the film’s screenings bring in at least $2.5 for every dollar invested in the production. The point is that half the takings goes to the cinema owners and the remaining half is shared between those involved in producing and distributing the film.”
“Why did you go to Skolkovo?”
“There were several reasons. The first was the financial component: Skolkovo’s investment terms were very favourable, definitely no worse than those of western venture companies. If you work in a venture fund in the USA, in 2-3 rounds of financing you’ll lose up to 50 and sometimes up to 60% of your company. Here we have the opportunity for 100% of the company to remain in Russia.”
“Are you receiving money and potentially all the profit from this project?”
“That’s the first factor. It’s also an opportunity to use the foundation’s business connections, which enable us to have an easy conversation both with Russian and with foreign companies. There’s already a lot of interest being shown in the project by, for example, Google, Cisco and IBM. Naturally, this enables us to open doors easily not only in the world of film, which is already open to us, but also in the world of IT. There wouldn’t be anyone in California who refused to meet us on hearing about Skolkovo and our project.”
“How seriously did you take your application to Skolkovo when you were making it? After all, the film business and innovations on a mass scale are different things. Didn’t they say to you: what’s it got to do with us – we’re all academics here?”
“It was a difficult process. For us it was worthwhile making a very big effort to explain what the economic benefit from it would be. Just before we talked to the film studios, they asked if they could give us some kind of letter – that they were interested in what we’re developing. The bottom line of our application to Skolkovo is 500 pages of analysis. After this they said to us: okay, let’s submit this to the investment committee. And the first impression of this project was probably somewhat sceptical, but this allowed us to approach the project in a more prepared state. When we got started, we understood exactly what we had to do and why. At that moment we had the whole project plan and schedule developed in detail.”